As a recent Wall Street Journal article recounts, Japanese manufacturers, once the world’s leaders in electronic goods and especially in cell phone technology, lost big in the switch to smartphones.
The author attributed their fall to the manufacturers’ inward focus: They concentrated their major technological advancement on televisions and, as to the cell phone, simply focused on the peculiar features successful in their home market. The iPhone and its smartphone progeny threw them for a loop both in connection with phone sales and in the way that the smartphone has impacted the manufacturers’ other major product lines: electronic game machines and digital cameras.
This same message plays itself out every day for medical groups that concentrate all of their business firepower on one or a very small handful of business opportunities, from single-facility exclusive contracts to specialty practices dependent on one large referral source. It also plays itself out when groups exclude from consideration any experience from outside their group.
The smartphone has conquered Japan. What is lurking just outside of your group?
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Mark F. Weiss
